An Arachnid's Anticlimactic Arcane Adventure
by heofBOOYAH
Summary: A Spidey-centric one-shot that also includes Iron Fist and an OC named Merlin. The characters are re-imagined as part of a larger continuity I'm working on. Spidey's swing time is interrupted by a robbery turned hostage situation, but the real headache is the sorcerer inside the burglarized jewelry store. Rated M for language.


**This is a sample story set in a larger-scale Marvel continuity that I plan to write. I'm hoping to get some feedback from anyone and everyone willing to give it on my interpretation of the characters and the way I tell the story. This isn't the Marvel Universe you know; it's influenced by classic comics, modern comics, Ultimate comics, and even the movies and TV shows to a certain extent, but it's all been adapted to suit my own tastes. I have heard it said, by talented writers, that the best way to write an enjoyable story is to write a story that you would enjoy yourself, and that's what I'm doing with my interpretation of the continuity and this sample. This story will focus on my interpretation of Spider-Man, at a point in his life when he has been mentored by more experienced heroes like Iron Man but hasn't realized his full potential yet. He's about 17 or 18 here. For clarity, I'll explain now that what I refer to as "psychic alignment" is the Spider-sense, and that the ability is stronger and more extensive in this incarnation. My reasons for changing the name would take forever to explain, so I'll just have to promise that it makes more sense in the context of the larger story.**

**I'll be writing other short stories about other characters in the main story. I'm planning to hit Iron Fist next, since he'll be appearing in this story as someone Spidey has already been friends with for a while. Fist and Webs are roughly the same age.**

* * *

The new web shooters were a definite improvement over the old cable launchers. Blocking a punch from that Blunderbuss dude hadn't been great for Peter's arms, but his web shooters had taken the brunt of the impact. Tony Stark being Tony Stark, the wrecked equipment had turned into an excuse for an impromptu redesign, forcing Peter to use the wrist-mounted cable launchers Moon Knight had given him back when Peter hadn't had the resources to actually build the web shooters he designed. Tony Stark being Tony Stark, Peter had only been web-less for five days, but that had been enough to make him really miss the webs.

Since there was no pressing crisis at the moment, Peter took the time to simply enjoy the feeling of swinging, and to admire the new web shooters. Functionally, nothing had changed, but the technology for pressurizing the fluid had drastically improved, as had the web formula itself, allowing Peter to swing for most of a day without using up more than one or two cartridges. Tony Stark being Tony Stark, there were still redundant cartridges pre-loaded into the auto-rotating bracelet, and doubly redundant spare cartridges in the inside pockets of Spider-Man's new jacket.

Pete rather liked his new jacket, and his new look as a whole. As always, the base layer of his gear was a form-fitting black bodysuit courtesy of Charles Xavier. It was light, breathable, and durable, and showed a hint of blue when the light hit it right. It had attached gloves and shoes, and zipped up along the front of the torso until it reached the opening in the attached cowl, which had openings for the eyes and mouth. With the openings in the cowl, Peter always felt he was letting a little too much of his face show, so he always wore the same mask he'd had for years over the bodysuit's cowl. The intense red, the black web designs, and the unique eyes hadn't changed in three years. Neither had Peter's boots. Worn over the bluish-black bodysuit, the red color and the web designs matched the mask. It was the arms and torso of Peter's suit that tended to change. He usually wore something like a tight armored vest and long gloves, or maybe a short-sleeved padded shirt, over the torso of the bodysuit for added protection. This time, he had red fingerless gloves worn over the gloves of the bodysuit that stretched a few inches back along his forearm to cover the web shooters, which he wore outside the bodysuit. He didn't have any web designs on them this time. His new jacket was different. It was custom made and close fitting, with a high, tight collar that hid the dark fabric on his neck. The collar was specially reinforced to act as a moderate neck guard. His arms and torso were completely encased in the deep red sheath, down to his wrists and belt line. His signature black web pattern was only on the sleeves, extending from the hem of the sleeves up the arms and trailing off at the shoulders. As always, his spider logo was displayed proudly on the center of Peter's chest. It was larger and more aggressive than in the past, with more sharp angles. The jacket zipped up along the middle, bisecting the spider image when Peter took it off or needed to access the spare web cartridges hidden inside. While his blue-black undersuit was the sturdy mesh fabric used by the X-men, Spider-Man's mask, boots, gloves, and jacket were made of the same flexible yet highly resilient material worn by Captain America and members of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s combat units. Spider-Man was quite fond of his new gear.

Spider-Man was less fond of getting CIP alerts over the earpiece communicator hidden under his headgear. CIP was the acronym for Crime In Progress. Spidey wasn't at all fond of idiots who thought they were tough trying to act tough during his swing time. He always got the strangest urge to punch people who broke the law - at least, that's how he in his infinite sarcasm would describe his motivation. By all indications, the CIP was really no big deal. The message was less about requesting superhuman backup than it was about making sure any metahumans in the area were informed, just in case. Even so, the disturbance was near enough, and Spider-Man's code strict enough, that he couldn't help getting involved. What he found at the scene was nothing he hadn't expected after the call he'd received. Someone had tried to hold up a jewelry store and someone tried to stop them. The good Samaritan had been shot, and the would-be robber freaked out and turned a botched theft into a hostage crisis. By all indications there was only one man. That could always be wrong, but any partners in crime would be easily noticed by Spider-Man no matter how well they hid from the cops. As he dropped into the street, Spider-Man was careful to land far enough away from the storefront that the man with the hostages wouldn't have the right angle to detect the presence of a superhero. A squad car was still pulling up from down the street, giving Spidey a chance to let the boys in blue know what he was planning. Waving to get the driver's attention, he motioned towards the alley next to the jewelry store, indicating that he was going to sneak in from behind. The officer nodded and proceeded to help cover the front of the store.

Getting to the back of the store was no problem. Getting in the back door silently was no challenge either, given his training with Wolverine. It wasn't until he got inside that things got tricky. Meditation and input from Professor Xavier had helped him hone his psychic alignment enough to sense latent threats as well as active ones, and to distinguish between different types and magnitudes of danger. The failed robber could have been dealt with in less than five seconds, but there was something else in the storefront that radiated a strong mystic signature, and it was too calm and stable for Spider-Man to know if he was sensing a friend or a foe. He quickly retreated as silently as he had entered, knowing that it would be best to fill in the cops outside. He wasn't worried about them jumping the gun - the unofficial Manhattan protocol was to trust Spider-Man's judgement - but they needed to know what was up, and Spider-Man needed more backup. When he focused his psychic alignment, he found that he could sense the souls of the people around him, glowing like candles. If a normal human's soul was a candle, then Captain America was a strong blaze as tall as Spidey himself. And if Captain America was a human-sized bonfire, then the mystic entity Spidey was sensing now was a two-story inferno, with energy levels on par with the Hulk.

When Spidey returned to the outside of the store he was pleased to see that another superhuman had already arrived, and there was no one Spider-Man would rather team up with than Iron Fist. Loving to experiment with combat the way he did, Fist went through equipment changes constantly. This time around, he was wearing a flexible black karate uniform with black gloves and what looked like ninja shoes with an equally ninja mask, with tough green cloth wrappings around his hands, his lower shins, and his torso and neck under the loose black uniform. A wide green cloth served as a belt, clasped in place by a round gold buckle with an Oriental dragon embossed on it. The cloth outfit didn't look very sturdy, but Spider-Man knew he was looking at several thousand dollars worth of enhanced mesh fabric, strong enough to stand up to a knife if a normal human was the one holding it. Iron Fist looked in Spidey's direction before the assembled police even knew the wall-crawler was there, and even though his mask revealed nothing but his pale blue eyes, he managed to smile at his friend.

Spidey was glad to see Fist there, because the unkown presence in the store was now radiating enough energy for Spider-Man to sense it from across the street, which he hadn't been able to do before. He wanted someone he was used to working with who also understood what was going on, and Iron Fist fit the bill. As soon as Spidey reached Fist and a few assembled officers, he asked his friend about the mystic energy.

"How many people, or things, that you know of can radiate this much power while still in a passive state?" was the first thing he wanted to know.

"Dr. Strange, his friend Clea, his amulet, our classmate Merlin, the shrine in Kun-Lun and a few related items, Thor and friends, Baron Mordo, Dormammu, and Mephisto," Fist answered. "Possibly Victor Van Damme and Dr. Strange's apprentice. Dr. Strange's crew and Merlin are cool, but if it was one of them..."

"They would have taken down the robber on their own by now," Spidey finished.

"Umm..." a detective inserted, confusion evident in his voice.

"Sorry, Detective..."

"Duncan Anderson."

"Detective Duncan, not all my powers are actually spider-based," Spider-Man explained quickly. "There's a skill called psychic alignment - Iron Fist has it too - that we use to sense the energy around us like... Basically like Jedi. You with me so far?" Detective Anderson nodded slightly.

"Well, right now our psychic alignment is telling us that someone or something in the jewelry store is giving off levels of energy on par with The Mighty Freaking Thor, and it's definitely mystical in nature."

The detective's eyebrows shot up. "That's an... um..."

"It's a problem," Spider-Man finished. "But that's not all, I didn't sense a damn thing until I was almost in the same room as the energy source, but now..." he trailed off, knowing Iron Fist would pick up for him.

"Now it's doing the psychic equivalent of holding a neon sign over its head that says 'Here I Am.' The fact that this change just happened to take place just as Spidey was getting close..."

"Probably isn't a coincidence," Spider-Man continued. "He, she, or it - probably a he or a she - was concealing itself before but decided to stop when it sensed me."

Detective Duncan had been on enough weird cases to follow this explanation better than most, but one part perplexed him. "What makes you think it's probably a person?" he asked.

"A living sorcerer can make a conscious choice to suppress his or her powers to avoid detection," Fist explained. "That's why Spider-Man couldn't sense this a minute ago. An inanimate object couldn't normally do that, even in the world of magic."

The detective nodded and looked at the ground for a moment, processing all the information. "And I'm guessing you two are taking the time to tell me this so I can help keep the area from getting hexed to kingdom come, right?" he asked rhetorically. "So what's the play?"

The play, as it turned out, was simple. Iron Fist had arcane tattoos, invisible to the naked eye and most mystic ones, which made him highly resistant to hostile magic. There were also a few special seals that would allow him to shut down certain types of spells that were dangerous without being attack spells per se, like a rift in space. So it was decided that Spider-Man would sling him into the front window of the jewelry store with his web lines, follow faster than the failed robber could react, take down said robber while Fist and his ink guarded against possible magical peril, and then help Fist punch the lights out of the sorcerer if he or she became a problem. The police would be right behind them to secure the area. It was a hasty and careless plan with dozens of potential holes, and the police had every confidence that the two heroes would pull it off flawlessly. Superheroes always made stupid plans work. So Spider-Man casually hopped back eight feet, attached a pair of web lines to Iron Fist's back, and slung him around a few times to build redundant momentum before hurling his friend across a street and through a storefront window. And no one questioned the wisdom of this for a second.

Iron Fist crashed through the window and landed in the middle of the store with the unknown mystic entity on his left. Upon looking in the appropriate direction, he relaxed and laughed as Spider-Man zipped in behind him to knock out the would-be crook. Spider-Man turned to Iron Fist in confusion before laying eyes on the source of the energy that had so unnerved him. He wasn't nearly as amused as the ever-relaxed Fist. He walked over to the wall of the store where the hostages had been crouching fearfully and stared at one in particular. He was staring at someone in his late teens, with shaggy dark hair that hung in his vivid blue eyes, an angular jaw with a hint of stubble, and an air of sheepishness. He wasn't dressed like he could afford anything in the store, with frayed dark brown pants and black shoes that were nice a long time ago, a grainy tan button-down shirt that used to be white, and a rumpled light brown coat that looked lived in. The young man was trying very hard not to look Spider-Man in his reflective eye lenses.

"What the hell Merlin," Spider-Man asked with false calm. The mystic prodigy, alias Merlin, was a fellow student of Spider-Man and Iron Fist in the advanced class at the Avengers Academy. "You could have just fried the dude's gun and frozen his feet in place instead of making us _freak the fuck out_ with your _excessive fucking mystic aura,"_ he intoned. Spider-Man didn't always intone things, but when he did, it meant he was ready to go total ape-shit on someone. In this case, he was ready to go ape-shit on Merlin for making everyone panic about a high-level sorcerer on top of a hostage situation while he _sat in a damn corner._

Merlin tried not to be visibly amused at Spider-Man's frustration as he defended himself in a faint English accent, still sitting on the wall with his knees pulled up. "Well the last time I tried to save a small store I blew up the small store," he reasoned. Most people found his accent charming, but Spider-Man found it quite irritating at the moment. He was, in general, irritated with Merlin at the moment.

"And what exactly was your reason for making me wonder if Baron Fucking Mordo was in the store?" Spidey asked with the same false calm.

"I was trying to let you know I was in here, so we could come up with a plan," Merlin protested mildly. "It was the only way to contact you without alerting the culprit, which would have been very bad for the hostages."

"The only way..." Spider-Man said slowly, "except the damn ACADEMY ID TAGS that have a DAMN GPS. The ones we have with us AT ALL TIMES, MERLIN."

Merlin shifted uncomfortably on the ground, looking a bit embarrassed and still not meeting Spider-Man's stare. "I, um, I think I left my tags at the Academy dorm this morning," he replied uncomfortably.

"You did what?"

"I, well, I forgot them."

"..." Spidey said. "You did what?"

"..."

"You _forgot them?_"

Spider-Man looked away in exasperation, and realized that the police had gotten the hostages out of the building while he's been having his little chat with the most airheaded damn superhero he'd ever met. Iron Fist was leaning against the store counter, laughing into his hand in a laughable attempt to control his amusement. This was the sixth time this had happened in the last four days. Spider-Man reviewed those numbers in his head and realized they were accurate. Merlin had managed to lose his ID tags twice in one day for two days in a row. The young mage was quickly becoming Spider-Man's biggest headache. Spider-Man was one of very few Avengers Academy students to have genuine crimefighting experience before enrolling, and he was the only one with a public image, so he was expected by the students, the faculty, S.H.I.E.L.D., the government, the Avengers, and probably others he had forgotten to be something of a leader and a role model at the Academy. This made him feel that he was, in a vague way, responsible for Merlin and other students who struggled with the structure of Academy life. It was a vague sense of duty, but it was still Responsibility, which for Spider-Man always had a capital "R." The end result of this was that every time the socially challenged and absentminded Merlin had trouble remembering their society's conventions - which was often - Spider-Man ended up having to deal with it. But not this time.

"I don't even... I don't even know. Fist, go with him back to the Academy to file a report on this incident. And make sure he doesn't get lost on his way to his dorm afterwards," he said before he jumped out the broken window and swung away. Before he cleared the window sill he heard a short bark of laughter escape Iron Fist's self control. As he sailed through the air, he couldn't help feel a little bad for Merlin. The young mage was one of the most powerful young heroes that anyone knew of - certainly he had more firepower than anyone else at the New York branch of the Avengers Academy, beating out close to a thousand members of their generation based on that alone. But because of his inattentiveness and the mistakes that resulted from it, he was the most ridiculed student at the Academy. No one dared mock Merlin to his face for fear of being banished to a pocket dimension, but Spider-Man heard the whispered comments and he knew Merlin did too. He sighed as he swung, remembering Flash Thompson and the basketball team. His conscience was going to keep making him do Merlin favors, it seemed.

Hours Later, Merlin got to his dorm room ten minutes past curfew, having accidentally passed it and gotten lost while he contemplated the principles of trans-temporal enchantments and their implications for the development of dimensional reality. He released the cloaking spell that had kept him from getting caught, with his hand on the doorknob, because he realized that finding his dorm had been pointless. Academy ID tags doubled as keys, among other things. With his tags still locked inside his room, he would have to ask the dorm head to unlock the door using the master key for his building. The dorm heads were friendly, but anyone put in a position of authority by the faculty was generally a strict follower of the rulebook, guaranteed to report Merlin's infraction of losing his tags. An infraction that was now compounded by his being out after curfew. Merlin turned to go wake the dorm head, but he found that his hand wouldn't come away from the doorknob. He looked down, and with a simple spell enhanced his night vision. His new clarity of sight revealed a small patch of webbing on the underside of the knob. Merlin crouched down to get a better look, and smiled when he saw his ID tags adhered to the handle. Freeing his tags and his hand from the webs with another spell, Merlin entered his room and closed the door.

* * *

**So, thoughts? I started this on a whim with no clear idea of where it was going, but I like how it turned out. I hope you found it enjoyable. There are a few points I want to ask you about. Let's start with that psychic alignment business. I know it's weird, just remember that this is set in a larger story. It makes sense in the larger story, I promise. Now, Spider-Man and Iron Fist. What did you think of their costumes, and their personalities? I know Iron Fist laughing at Merlin is definitely meaner that what we're used to. I was sort of improvising, looking for new ways to imagine the character. It's a hobby of mine. And what about Merlin? He's an OC, I hope you liked him because I want to make him fairly important in the larger story. My original image of him was brooding as fuck, but the more I thought about it the more I felt like that plus his power levels screamed Marty Stu, so I tried to make him more vulnerable and clumsy here. Let me know how you feel about him. As for the Avengers Academy, the whole idea came from a one-page ad that I don't even remember clearly. So basically it's my own thing. As the name suggests, it's a place where young superheroes are trained to maybe be considered as future Avengers. There wasn't much info on it here, but hopefully there was enough for you to understand the story. And don't worry, this isn't a "Let's-put-everyone-into-a-highschool-fanfic," the story begins in freaking Sumeria, goes through WWII with Captain America, goes through everyone from X-Men to Dr. Strange, and continues long after Spider-Man leaves the Academy.**

**I really hope you enjoyed this little one-shot. As I said there will be others like it. Until I write them, enjoy this morsel, and please review.**


End file.
